All aspects of the War -- the fight between liberals and conservatives,
the deeper efforts of people for themselves, the continent-wide extension
of the struggle -- were involved in 1833, already well into the struggle,
when the acting President of Mexico decided to solve the problem of control
over California Indians. He was Valentín Gómez Farías,
a liberal.

The problem: Franciscan missionaries, up and down California,
had built missions, gathering Indians to live within them, and hoping to
shelter these converts from the influence of both Hispanic ranchers and
"savage" Indians. The intended converts were not thriving in the missions,
often fleeing into the hills to set up their own society as horse-traders
(and rustlers). Meanwhile, the ranchers were expanding their own
power in that frontier society, while Russian power threatened from the
north.

The Gómez Farías solution: Abolish the missions.
Turn the churches over to ordinary parish priests. Divide lands among
colonists, who might include Indians. Bring in new commercial interests,
plus teachers and skilled workers, to prepare California for the modern
world -- and to establish a buffer colony on the northern frontier.

While soldiers were off fighting the liberal/conservative struggle in central
Mexico, the Congress of the Republic passed the California legislation
that Gómez Farías wanted -- along with other "modernizing"
laws offensive to the Church. Within a year after that, Gómez
Farías had his team headed for California.

But Antonio López de Santa Anna turned politics around, expelled
Gómez Farías from power, and ended the War on conservative
terms. There was treachery all around, and compromise under the surface.
In California, not much came of the Gómez Farías program.
No social work. Nothing to keep ranchers from moving in on mission
lands.

Gómez Farías -- physician, civilian, rationalist -- was
a member of the Congress that met while Agustín Iturbide was still
emperor of Mexico. Iturbide was making grants to colonizers in far
provinces like Texas, and Farías was proposing a grand colonization
policy in the same vein. It was full of hope that new settlers from
abroad or from within Mexico might help to develop the Mexican north. While
the Catholic religion would be established in all the projected new communities,
welcome would be extended to Indians who sought asylum from the United
States, and any slaves brought into Mexico would be automatically freed.
A member of the "enlightened middle classes," Farías had no difficulty
projecting great plans under the regime of a man who proposed to be an
enlightened monarch.

Farías was closer to another rationalist politician, his fellow-senator
from Zacatecas, Francisco García Salinas. He had no ties to
the rough, non-intellectual insurgents from the south of Mexico, such as
Vicente Guerrero. After Iturbide was deposed, and new political factions
developed within the Republic, Farías aligned himself with the moderates
and propertied men who supported Manuel Gómez Pedraza. In
1829, when Congress ruled Pedraza's election invalid, bringing in Guerrero
instead, Farías hung on as senator. He kept his peace, hardly
daring to say anything political for months at a time. Then the Guerrero
administration recruited him to serve on committees as a loyal opposition
member. That was his role, still committed in principle to the hope for
a "legal" government, when Guerrero's vice-president Anastasio Bustamante
seized power. Bustamante, supported by many old-line generals, did not
restore the legal presidency of Pedraza. Instead, he held on to the
office himself, bringing in as his Secretary of Foreign and Interior Relations
the conservative ideologue Lucas Alamán.

The new administration executed Guerrero, and made Mexico City dangerous
for anyone who had supported him. But Gómez Farías
had one refuge, in a place where Alamán's whims would not be taken
as law. Since 1829, García Salinas was governor of Zacatecas.

Zacatecas

García Salinas appointed Farías to be secretary-general to
the government of Zacatecas. He himself was already fully committed
to a rationalist program of order and reform.

When he became governor, the state was suffering from large-scale "bandit"
raids that had sacked the mining towns of Fresnillo and Sombrerete.
The "populace," supporting the raiders, smacked of the same elements that
had attacked the Parián in Mexico City, or that Santa Anna might
mobilize in Veracruz. Like other silver-mining areas, Zacatecas was
struggling to recover from the dilapidations of the Insurgency years.
García shared with many (including Alamán) the belief that
new technology was necessary for the mines. He shared with other
liberals a belief that the efficiency of agriculture was hampered by the
concentration of land in the hands of church corporations or collective
peasant villages.

But García was no "free-market" liberal. His main complaint
against the churches and communities was that they left land undeveloped,
forcing workers into idleness, vagrancy, or crime, detached from the very
values that communities were supposed to promote. Society needed
some modern program that would produce the same results as the old policy
of congregación.

García pushed for government planning. He organized
a substantial state militia to put down riots. He organized corporations
to promote mining improvements, making some attempt to distribute shares
among people who were not part of the old mining interest. He created
a land bank that was supposed to take over church-owned land (paying for
it), along with lands held collectively by peasant villages. But
the bank would hold these lands in perpetuity, renting them to landless
and indigenous families, who would not have the right to sell. The
bank could use any extra funds to buy up haciendas, renting them off in
small parcels like its other holdings. Life was already forcing workers
off the land, and the distribution of family plots would bring them
back.

Results were thin. There was not much time, and the Church
mobilized political resistance. The bank did buy up five haciendas
and two ranches, distributing them among campesinos -- on the expectation
that renters would serve, with the new militias, "to fight vagrancy and
banditry." But the Zacatecas countryside was denser, with thousands
of small farms, hundreds of ranches and haciendas. Whether or not
particular communities were legal communes, people lived in communities
of some kind -- of which the vagrants were still a part. Right to
the end of his term, García was complaining that he couldn't get
people to turn in bandits.

On the national level García and Farías threw their support
to Gómez Pedraza, against the forces of "disorder," but also against
the extreme conservatives headed by Bustamante. They depended on
alliance with Santa Anna, who showed more interest in military exploit
than in governing. Where García had imagined a militia articulated
with economic programs, Santa Anna's recruiting style depended more on
the old devices of charisma, emergency appeals, and improvised drafts.

The (Vice-)Presidential Phase

After the defeat of Bustamante, Gómez Farías became finance
minister in the brief administration of Gómez Pedraza. He
was then elected Vice President at the same time Santa Anna was elected
President.
Santa Anna, who did not yet have a reliable cadre of supporters within
the national government, stayed home for long intervals and let Farías
take charge as acting president. On one thing the two men agreed
-- the tactic of mounting severe prosecutions against enemies of
the new government.

On much else, disagreement grew. For 10 months of the 13 from
March 1833 to April 1834, Farías appointed his own cabinets.
The new Congress, radical, passed most of what Farías asked.
The result, even without much time to implement the whole, laid out in
detail one version of the program that liberals were pushing in many countries:

In the area around Mexico City, the government confiscated property owned
by the descendants of Cortés, and devoted the proceeds to support
schools.

The California missions, and then all missions in the Republic, were secularized.

Top-level colleges were taken away from the Church, to become a modern
lay system of education, and the revenues from certain Church properties
were designated to support these institutions.

Monastic vows were made non-enforceable at law.

The collection of tithes by the Church was made non-enforceable at law.

The government asserted that it had inherited the Spanish state's right
to appoint clergy.

States were encouraged to establish regional coalitions, with strong militia
systems independent of the national Army.

Corporal punishment was prohibited in the Army.

Gómez Farías wanted to use the landed properties owned and
rented out by monasteries, in order to pay the national debt. To
block speculators or state governments from gobbling up monastery lands
for themselves, he planned something like the Zacatecas idea, of leaving
properties intact while turning the rents into a permanent government revenue.

Many of the administration's supporters called for abolishing the "Fueros"
-- the exemption enjoyed by clergymen and army officers, from being tried
in civilian courts. Farías did not do this, nor did he move
toward any religious toleration for non-Catholics. Nevertheless,
"Religión y Fueros" became the conservative slogan against
him.

The California Project

While moderate liberals were friendly to the Church, and radical liberals
unfriendly, almost all groups were willing to confiscate some church property
rather than pay taxes themselves. Much of the laity thought that
the California missions were out of step with modern 19th-century standards.
Local authorities, and officials sent out from Mexico City, sought to "secularize"
the missions, giving the religious function over to ordinary priests, and
finding something to do with the Indian workers. Uncertainty about
this "something," plus political confusion, the remoteness of California,
and the reluctance of the Franciscans, slowed the whole process.

While conservatives and liberals agreed on secularization as such, and
were in this sense all "liberal," they disagreed on what should happen
next. Conservatives wanted to transform the Indian congregations into something
like Mexican indigenous communities, recognize their formal title to the
mission land, but keep them under the guidance of local white leaders.
Liberals wanted to transform the mission Indians into individual Mexican
citizens, and establish colonies on the northern frontier against Russian
expansion.

Finally, Farías cut short the old process by which clergy and
laity alike had kept saying that the California missions would be secularized,
but sometime in the future. A new law said: Now.

Not only that, but Farías gathered a whole assemblage of teachers
and artisans to go out to California, to establish a new colony. The Director
of the colony would have authority over mission lands, and would also become
Governor of the state. A "Peace Corps"-ish group, it left for California
about the same time that Santa Anna finally ejected Gómez Farías
from office.

Santa Anna, not surprisingly, sent a hurried message to the sitting
Governor of California, telling him not to turn over his office to the
new arrival. But the President may not have realized that the Director
of the colony was still an appointed official, independent of the governorship.
He did nothing to relieve the Director of any powers over colony and company.
As a result, the Governor and the Director wrangled for months over the
mission Indians and the mission lands.

That Governor, General José Figueroa, was in fact well
qualified to act out the Santa Anna role on a provincial level. At
first, he had seemed more the radical -- a lieutenant to Vicente Guerrero
during the insurgency, at a time when Santa Anna was still a hard royalist.
He served as secretary to Guerrero when Guerrero was negotiating with Iturbide
the terms of the Plan de Iguala. He managed not to offend Iturbide,
when Guerrero later rebelled against the new Mexican Empire, then got back
in Guerrero's favor, then later managed to win appointments from the government
that killed Guerrero. In California, he quickly acquired property
without having to pay much for it. He adopted the landowner stance
of defending the property of mission Indians against both Franciscans and
reformers -- but not against his new landowner friends.

-- and After

In both California and central Mexico, elements of the Gómez
Farías program survived for a time, even after Santa Anna drove
Farías into exile. Zacatecas held on to its militia until
May of 1835, when President Santa Anna marched up to defeat
the state forces. Members of the Farías colony held on
in California, while Figueroa accused them of conspiring with Indian rebels.
By summer he dispersed them, some back to central Mexico, others off into
whatever they could find for themselves locally.

In later years, Farías kept imagining that he could use practical
politicians to serve his own unrealistic ends. He thought that he
could manipulate the Texas rebels of 1836 into regenerating a federalist
Mexico. He thought that he could work with the federalist frontier
general José Urrea in 1840, to fight Bustamante. He thought
that in 1847 he could play again the part of Santa Anna's Vice-President,
mounting a program to confiscate church property for the war against the
United States. For his pains that time, he found himself again deposed
by Santa Anna.

Some part of the Farías colonization plans had always operated
in the same world as Frances Wright's Nashoba, the colony founded near
Memphis in 1826, to train ex-slaves for colonization back in Africa.
Like García Salinas renting land to some peasants in Zacatecas,
Farías was not so much fighting for people, as fitting them into
a plan. A Santa Anna or a Jackson -- or a Figueroa -- could push people
and exploit them, but rarely tried to change them.